Lessons Learned in Pencil Drawing: The Importance of Size

One of the most unexpected lessons I’ve learned through pencil drawing has nothing to do with shading or line quality - it has to do with size.

When I first started sketching, I would often draw too small. A face, a figure, or a composition would barely take up a third of the page. While it felt comfortable and manageable at first, I later realised how limiting this habit had become.

Working small often leads to cramped gestures, tight lines, and a reluctance to explore bold forms. It becomes harder to capture the energy of a pose or the full expression of a face when there’s no room to move your hand or loosen up your strokes.

Increasing the scale of my sketches, even just slightly, opened up everything. The lines became more fluid, the gestures stronger, and the overall drawings more confident. It also improved my understanding of proportion and structure, since I was now forced to confront them at a larger scale.

Drawing larger doesn’t mean abandoning control; it means giving yourself the space to think in forms, not just outlines. It allows for corrections, layering, and above all, movement. And when you're drawing with pencils, movement is what brings life to the work.

One of the key benefits of working at a larger scale is that it encourages you to draw not only with your fingers, but with your wrist and even your shoulder. This shift in physical engagement changes everything. It frees up your motion, helps you build stronger lines, and introduces a new level of gesture and dynamism into your drawings. The more your whole arm is involved, the more expressive and confident your strokes become.

So if you find yourself stuck, tightening up, or repeating the same types of sketches, consider this: maybe all you need is a bigger piece of paper.

#PencilDrawing #SketchingTips #DrawingFundamentals #TraditionalArt #ArtProcess #SimonLocheArt

Digital Landscape Study: Clouded Sky and Marshy Seashore at Sunset (Infinite Painter)

This recent digital painting study, created in Infinite Painter on iPad, was inspired by a dramatic coastal scene that captured both atmosphere and tension. The focus of the piece was a cloud-filled sky at sunset, heavy with movement and light shifts, stretched above a quiet shoreline dotted with marshes.

I was drawn to the contrast between the weight of the clouds and the softness of the fading sunlight reflecting on the water.

Working in Infinite Painter allowed me to blend texture and color efficiently, experimenting with brushes that mimic oil or pastel without losing precision. I kept the palette tight, leaning into cool purples, desaturated greens, and streaks of warm orange light cutting through the grey.

The result is more about mood than detail. It’s an attempt to capture that fleeting moment at the end of a stormy day, when the clouds finally break and the light spills across the land in unexpected places, one of those moments when the landscape feels bigger than you.

Looking forward to exploring more scenes like this.

#DigitalLandscape #InfinitePainter #iPadArt #CloudscapePainting #SeashoreStudy #SunsetMood #SimonLocheArt